Tropes
Video game concept
For tags that have no better parent tag.
Child groups
| Alone | Player never meets any friendly or even neutral people during the game/story. | 1981 / 2024 | 432 games | |
| Anomalies | Strange abnormal occurrences that have no (clear) explanation within the mythos. | 2007 / 2024 | 18 games | |
| Anticipatory sightings | Player catches glimpses of future dangers. | 1998 / 2020 | 54 games | |
| Arc words | A word or phrase that appears repeatedly without explanation, except maybe much later, that may or may not have significant meaning. | 2007 / 2016 | 13 games | |
| Army of One | The protagonist deals death as if they were a whole army company. Especially if the opponents treat them as such. | 1989 / 2024 | 155 games | |
| Catch phrase | 1 game | |||
| Chosen one | The protagonist is chosen by someone of authority, such as a ruler, to do something important alone for whatever reason. | 1985 / 2024 | 181 games | |
| Death pits | Includes pits where once you fall, you're never coming back. Either you die during the fall, hitting the bottom or there's just no way out of them and the game doesn't have the grace to call it a game over. | 1984 / 2022 | 288 games | |
| Elevator battle | A fairly simple scene where player is attacked during an elevator ride somehow. Commonly involves an open elevator of some sorts at a side of a building or a freight elevator. | 1995 / 2019 | 43 games | |
| Eternal fires | You've just entered a location that hasn't been visited in ages (if ever) by intelligent creatures, yet you find torches, fireplaces, and such happily burning as if someone had just switched and lighted them all for your pleasure. | 2010 / 2017 | 10 games | |
| Evil is Good | Evilness, cruelty, etc. are presented as desirable traits. | 1992 / 2020 | 63 games | |
| Evil military | Military is depicted as evil, aggressive, or otherwise heedless of how the normal people suffer of their actions. | 2002 / 2009 | 2 games | |
| Fetching | Player must fetch things for someone. | 1988 / 2015 | 12 games | |
| Foreshadowing | Dialog, text, imagery, or other things that seem meaningless at the time encountered, but actually tell of coming events. | 2010 / 2018 | 6 games | |
| Frozen time | A place where cultural, scientific and other advances (or progress/change) seem to have ceased to occur or have become endless variations of the old. Essentially innovation itself has become absent. | 1993 / 2010 | 3 games | |
| Good prevails | For some inexplicable reason, being on the side of good, justice, love or some other generally positive thing somehow grants you power to defeat those that oppose it. Or at least so the wielder of that power would have you believe. | 2002 / 2004 | 2 games | |
| Human experiments | Involves humans or other sentient creatures unwillingly being subjected to experiments. | 1994 / 2017 | 82 games | |
| Human superiority | Humans are depicted, one way or another, somehow superior to all other beings. | 2005 / 2017 | 12 games | |
| Humanity | Humanity (not as species) plays a part in the game's story or is part of the game mechanics in some manner. | 2000 / 2018 | 14 games | |
| Ill-equipped | You start out your quest to save the universe with a stick, or the near equivalent of. | 1981 / 2020 | 126 games | |
| Infallible | The protagonist is treated as an infallible person, incapable of doing or being wrong. | 3 games | ||
| Item get | Getting an item, especially important (plot) item, is accompanied by a dramatic pose (often the item held high) and a fanfare or similar. May be limited to plot items. | 1989 / 2018 | 97 games | |
| Last hope | The protagonist (and possibly a small group of allies, friends, or coworkers) is presented as the last hope to prevent - or last one(s) capable of preventing - some great disaster. | 1992 / 2016 | 14 games | |
| Savior | The protagonist is recognized by people as someone who will save them from one thing or another, before they do the saving. | 1993 / 2015 | 12 games | |
| Tangible abstracts | Abstract concepts are given physical form. | 1984 / 2016 | 44 games (1 characters) | |
| The unnamed | There's an item, person, people, or some other entity that people refuse to name. | 2001 / 2010 | 3 games | |
| Tombstones | Features humorous quips or references written on tombstones as epitaphs. Likely things the authors couldn't fit anywhere else but didn't want to discard them. | 1982 / 2023 | 73 games | |
| Transhumanism | Deals with the general theme of human augmentation, especially when this is part of the gameplay itself. | 1985 / 2023 | 86 games | |
| Traproom | Includes one or more locations where the player is locked in a room where they either have to fight off a horde of monsters or struggle against time to solve one or more problems to escape before dying. | 1986 / 2020 | 88 games | |
| Unity by force | Story involves some faction trying to "unite" people by force, exterminating anyone who doesn't see eye to eye with their vision. Usually marching in with armed forces and then demanding people to submit to their rule. | 1997 / 2013 | 10 games | |
| Wasted effort | Player is given an arduous task, which upon completion is found to have been completely pointless or unneeded. | 1991 / 2015 | 17 games | |
| Whispers | Player character hears unexplainable whispering, chanting or other voices. | 1999 / 2015 | 45 games |